Miss Cranston Diner, an 'institution' full of memories, gutted by fire

Friday

Mar 21, 2014 at 6:30 AM

CRANSTON, R.I. — A fire overnight tore through the Miss Cranston Diner, a longtime presence in the city. Arriving crews found flames “blowing out of the windows in the kitchen area,” said Deputy Fire Chief Paul Valletta Jr. It took about two hours to

By Mike McKinney

CRANSTON, R.I. – An hours-of-operation sign bobbed unnaturally in the breeze Friday where a glass door had been until a fire raged overnight through the Miss Cranston Diner, a touchstone for generations of people and inspiration for a diner in an old TV sitcom pilot called, of all things, “Better Days.”

Frank DePalo, 86, remembered such days. He lives around the corner and stood outside the diner Friday morning, its windows smashed out, its kitchen gutted and the sound of shovel scraping up debris against pavement.

Memories began to unfurl.

“It’s like an institution,” DePalo said of the diner. Back in the day, “it was open most of the night. We’d all go to the movies and stuff like that, or dancing down at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet.

And how they danced at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, he said. The guys and gals stood on opposite sides. A guy would venture over to ask a lady to dance.

Movies watched, dancing done, DePalo said, everybody came here, to this place at 1224 Oaklawn Ave. that dates to 1948. He tended toward eggs and toast. He said he could remember times when it seemed he was at the diner every day.

“It’s a sad thing,” DePalo said.

Rosa Diarbian, daughter of the diner’s current owner, Levon Tovmasian, said at the scene that her father, who she said bought the diner about seven years ago, would like to bring the place back.

“We would love to for my dad – this is his passion,” she said.

A passerby, who was headed to a nearby CVS, saw flames and called in the fire at about 2 a.m.

Arriving crews found fire “blowing out of the windows in the kitchen area,” said Deputy Fire Chief Paul Valletta Jr.

When fire crews got inside the diner, “It looked like it had been going a while,” Valletta said.

The heaviest fire appeared to be in the kitchen, he said.

No one was injured in the fire, as the diner was unoccupied, but one person was taken to a hospital for a medical issue. The diner was not open at the hour the fire was spotted by the passerby. Early indications were the diner had not been open for several hours.

It was not immediately known how long the fire had been burning.

The Providence Journal reported in a 2001 piece that the diner has been there since 1948.

In March 1992, The Journal reported that a film crew was coming to Cranston to get a shot of a home there for the pilot episode of a CBS show called “Better Days.” The Journal story said a key character’s favorite hangout would be a place called the Miss Providence Diner.

“It’s based on the old Miss Cranston Diner,” the show’s producer was quoted as saying.

The diner had been owned by members of the Marsocci family for decades. In 1998, the Journal reported, two brothers, Peter and Harry Marscocci, had at times worked different shifts from each other so that the diner would be running all day long.

Harry Marsocci died in 1998 at age 44 from Eastern equine encephalitis. The diner was closed for a time that year following his death but reopened, according to a Journal story about the reopening.

-- The original version of this report was published at 7:30 a.m. and updated at 8:35 and 11:26 a.m.

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